Hosting Models
Cloud Hosting
Hosting that runs your site or app across a pool of virtual servers instead of one fixed machine, so capacity can grow or shrink on demand.
Cloud hosting spreads your workload across a fleet of virtual machines carved out of large data-center hardware, rather than tying you to a single physical box. If one host fails, another picks up the slack. If traffic triples overnight, you add resources without migrating anywhere.
The label covers a wide range. At one end sit the hyperscalers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, with hundreds of services. At the other end are developer-friendly VPS providers like DigitalOcean, Linode, Vultr, and Hetzner, where you rent a predictable slice of a server for a flat monthly price. Most people renting their first real server want the second kind.
What actually distinguishes cloud hosting from old-school shared hosting is where the resources come from: a virtualized pool you can resize, not a fixed carve-out of one machine. That flexibility is also where the surprise bills hide, since usage-based pricing means the meter never fully stops.
Go deeper
- What Is Cloud Hosting?Cloud hosting spreads your site or app across a network of virtual servers instead of one physical machine.
- How to Actually Choose Between Cloud ProvidersA decision process that starts with your constraints, not with a spec comparison table.